New Nuclear Power Plants in the next 5 years 850
Guinnessy writes "As oil, coal, and gas become increasingly expensive, energy utilities take another look at nuclear power. The nuclear reactor builders are jostling for business as more than 26 plants may be ordered or constructed over the next five years in Canada, China, several European Union countries, India, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, and South Africa. Companies in the US and UK may order an additional 15 new reactors. Physics Today magazine has a global roundup of the new plants on construction, and how the builders are getting around some of the potential road blocks in their path. I'm sure many slashdot readers would be surprised to know that some new plants will be coming online so soon."
Re: (Score:2)
Alternative: fusion (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Alternative: fusion (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Alternative: fusion (Score:5, Funny)
Fusion is the energy of the future (Score:3, Funny)
coal (Score:3, Informative)
Mod Parent Down! FUD. (Score:3, Informative)
Coal on average contains 3ppm (parts per million) of uranium.
By comparision, ordinary soil contains between 1.8 and 5ppm of uranium.
So let's all try and not smear the boards with nuclear industry marketing material shall we?
Mod Parent Down! FUD! (instead of the grandparent) (Score:3, Informative)
Not only that, but all the carbon that makes up the majority of the coal gets burnt off in the power plant, so the concentration of uranium is *much* higher in the soot.
Let's not all try and smear the boards with the anti-nuke lobby's propaganda, shall we?
Re:Mod Parent Down! FUD! (instead of the grandpare (Score:3, Informative)
There's lots of reasons to stay away from quarries... As for the rest of that stuff, the type of dust that usually gets stirred up isn't usually from the types of soil that contain uranium. The uranium is usually contained in pebbles broken off of granite ledges.
It's been pointed out in these comments already, but 99.5% of the radioactive material burned from coal is cau
Nuclear can be safe (Score:5, Informative)
It depends on the design. The classic designs that have been used in the U.S. have a serious problem. If coolent flow fails, the reactor can melt down.
Pebble bed reactors [wikipedia.org] are designed to fail safely. If the flow of coolent stops, so does the reaction. The fuel is safely encased in tennis ball-sized graphite "pebbles" which are dropped in the top of the reactor and retrieved at the bottom. For there to be a release of the radioactive material, the pebble has to be broken open. Even if that happens, the amount that's released is very tiny.
There is a problem with fire, since the pebbles are graphite, but fire is a lot easier to deal with than a melt-down.
The point is that we need nuclear power in order to ween ourselves off of oil, but we also need to demand that safe reactor designs are used.
Re:Nuclear can be safe (Score:3, Informative)
Lets correct some points. PBMRs *do* use graphite. PBMR proponents glorify the fact that as they heat, the rate of reaction goes down. So? Such is the case for all modern nuclear reactors. PWRs boil off the water, their moderator, if they get too hot. That doesn't buy you anythi
Re:coal (Score:2, Informative)
I wonder if new nuclear plants are one of the surprises Bush was hinting at for reducing dependence on foreign oil?
Re:coal (Score:5, Informative)
That's the thing. They are radioactive [ornl.gov]
While coal burning indeed doesn't produce radiactivity like nuclear power does, there's actually so much radioactive material in it such as uranium that we'd get more power from refining it for the radioactives and sticking it in a reactor than burning it.
There's a former power plant worker out there that's DQ'd for life from working in a nuclear power plant because he absorbed too much radioactivity from his house. The bricks were made from coal ash.
Meanwhile, when you burn the coal, radioactive materials end up not only in the ash but go up the flue.
Re:coal (Score:2, Funny)
This worker was Dairy Queened for life? Hell, I build everything from coal ash if that is the result.
Re:coal (Score:5, Informative)
No we wouldn't, otherwise we'd be refining it from fly ash. As the ORNL article says, 99.5% of the fly ash produced by burning coal is retained by precipitators, not sent into the air, and thus could be processed and the radioactive material extracted after burning the coal. (Heck, it would be more concentrated that way.) Instead, Canada and Australia are the big uranium producers.
Re:coal (Score:3, Interesting)
In other words, ignoring the 97% recyclability of the uranium, the fly ash would only need a 120 parts/million density to 'generate' the same volume of radioactivity as a nuclear power plant. Even if you further presume that this radioactivity is pure uranium, and take into account that it takes 200tones of 'natural' u
Here we go again (Score:5, Informative)
Coal has enough problems without making things up. Paticularly in the USA sulphur oxides are a problem, and NOx are a problem everywhere (which is why we have pollution controls to stop acid rain and lesser problems) - and even after the pollution controls coal has the CO2 problem.
It's time for nuclear to talk about how good it is instead of bashing the opposition or comparing to purely portable or remote area solutions like solar cells that don't scale up. Push the new technology instead of regurgitating propaganda that doesn't stand up to minor scrutiny.
Re:Here we go again (Score:3, Interesting)
A large majority of pollution controls are never tested for efficiency. Large sources like power plants, however, are regularly tested (usually at least once every 5 years).
Aside from that, controls to remove NOx/SOx may not be appropriate for removing metals. NOx is usually removed using SNCR/SCR (selective [non] catalytic reduction). You pus
Re:Here we go again (Score:5, Informative)
Now you've read this, please consider reading something from a credible source on the issue (Chemistry journals, or something from EPRI who are as pro nuclear as they come since they are a power industry body but not are not nuclear propagandists) instead of spreading urban myths.
The Micheal Moore defence - they're bad so we can blow irrelevant insignificant details out of proportion - interesting but I don't see it as a good enough excuse.I disagree with the paper on ORNL and consider it junk science for the reasons pointed out in an earlier post. If others who are more credible than me considered it valid science they would cite it in scientific publications instead of it only being cited in newpapers and advertising, and there would be furthur papers expanding on it in the decades since it's publication. It stands alone, an example of bespoke research for the purposes of advertising.
Re:coal (Score:3, Insightful)
From the Wikipedia article on the subject of coal:
Coal also contains many trace elements, including arsenic and mercury, which are dangerous if rele
Re:coal (Score:5, Insightful)
No it doesn't, 99.5% of the thorium and uranium gets caught by the fly ash precipitators. Radon gas is released, but then wikipedia gets stupid: if it's released, it's not nuclear waste. The proper claim is that, while operating as designed, coal plants will release more radioactivity than nuke plants. "[...] the maximum radiation dose to an individual living within 1 km of a modern [coal-fired] power plant is equivalent to a minor, perhaps 1 to 5 percent, increase above the radiation from the natural environment." [usgs.gov]
Moreover, as for radioactive material, with the coal plant, that's it. There's no need for the whole decommisioning process with lots of radioactive material, because the plant itself and the fly ash isn't particularly radioactive. Same source: "One extreme calculation that assumed high proportions of fly-ash-rich concrete in a residence suggested a dose enhancement, compared to normal concrete, of 3 percent of the natural environmental radiation."
And before all you pro-solar, pro-wind, pro-tidal, pro-{insert alternative energy system here} get on my case
Ya gotta have a better argument than that.
On-demand plants like coal-fired ones can help smooth out the peaks and valleys. (I'll admit ignorance on whether any current nuke plants can operate in an on-demand mode and would have any benefit -- such as the fuel lasting longer -- in doing so.) And there are plenty of systems for storing and releasing power, batteries are by no means the only ones. Moreover, lots of industries are perfectly capable of adjusting their output as grid power waxes and wanes, and thus the price falls and rises. Large numbers of windmills in the sparsely populated Midwest could produce a good portion of our power needs, and are nearing cost-effectiveness, even without subsidies like Price-Anderson and the money spent on Yucca Mountain.
Re:coal (Score:4, Insightful)
but then wikipedia gets stupid: if it's released, it's not nuclear waste. The proper claim is that, while operating as designed
Ah, it's not waste, it's POLLUTION. Nuclear power plant waste isn't pollution because it's not released into the enviroment. Coal pollutes, because it releases a good portion of it's waste products into the atmosphere, including hazardous ones.
Here's the deal: You take the 24 tons of nuclear waste produced by a nuclear plant, grind it up, and mix it with 200,000 tons of something more or less inert, like sand.
Now compare it with the 200,000 tons of fly ash [uic.com.au] contaminated with such things as toxic metals, including arsenic, cadmium and mercury, organic carcinogens and mutagens (substances that can cause cancer and genetic changes) as well as naturally-occurring radioactive substances.
Which is more dangerous at that point?
There's no need for the whole decommisioning process with lots of radioactive material
How often have we extended the life of current nuclear reactors? Most of them seem to have a longer actual service life than their rated 20-40 years. Think of it like a driver's license. They operate for that long, then are re-examined before an extension is granted. Besides, it's just an additional expense. It's not like coal mining that both destroys the enviroment, pollutes, and costs hundreds of miners their lives each year.
Large numbers of windmills in the sparsely populated Midwest could produce a good portion of our power needs, and are nearing cost-effectiveness
I'll tell you what, we get some new nuclear plants up, multiples of the same type so we can get some economy of scale going, and we'll see how competitive windpower, and solar for that matter, is.
Oh, and Lincoln, NE's power company, right in the middle of the Midwest, decided to stop expanding wind power, because their mills were only producing usable electricity about 25% of the time. So it's not like it was saving them generation capacity.
As for Yucca Mountain, that's what you get when you let the government mess with the economy. They're horrible at it. Let the power companies figure something out. For that matter, let them reprocess the stuff.
Re:coal (Score:5, Interesting)
They're talking totals. They're counting the fuel rods still sitting on site in the plant's pool. Plants don't actually get decommisioned that often. They can store between 20-40 years production on site. Generally they can store 10-20 years waste in their pool alone. After that solutions vary. Some use above ground containers.
Apparently the nuke waste, since fly ash is used in concrete construction.
Concrete locks the stuff up and people aren't eating it. You could turn my sand into glass and nobody'd be able to tell a thing. Without some extreme scientific equipment.
We already get 15% of our grid power from nukes. Why do you need more plants for this comparison?
Because all our plants are of different, unique designs. This drives costs up. I'm talking about building a few dozen of the same type, so they can share those engineering expenses.
Tell you what, how about we remove Price-Anderson protection from nuke plants and require them to pay for their own waste storage (and insurance of same), and then do a comparison?
Hmm.. Price-Anderson's [wikipedia.org] 'protection' is simply a government mandated insurance co-op with a cap of 10 billion. Each plant provides 300 million of individual insurance. Only if the 10bil cap is exceeded does the fed.gov step in, and they tend to do so regardless for any disaster in the billions. Enacted in 1957, the individual insurances have only had to pay out $151 million, of which $70 million was TMI. The DOE has paid out $65 million, for reasons not listed. It could have been earlier, before the act was modified to establish the collective, and when the private insurance was only $50 million or so. Personally, I'd simply keep upping the collective amount. This would be easier with even more plants to pay into it.
As for the waste storage, I'm sure the power companies would love to take care of it themselves, they're being charged $.001 per kilowatt/hour [esmeraldanvnuke.com] for yucca mountain.
Given that wind power is growing at 25-35% per year, however, it looks like we'll get a good impression of how practical it is in the not-too-distant future anyway.
Survival of the fittest! Great idea. Love it if it works out, but I'm not holding my breath. Wind is so small even now that 25% growth isn't difficult. Kinda like when you only have 1 tower up. When you put the second up you've just doubled capacity. Doubling it's market share would be a better accomplishment.
Perhaps one of the new cheap solar techs we hear mentioned now and again will become practical, also. Since sunshine and AC load correlate pretty highly, powering one's AC from such a system takes care of the intermittent power production issue.
If it wasn't for the fact that I live so far north that my annual AC needs are like 1 week a year, I'd consider it too.
Re:coal (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Mr Burns Aside (Score:4, Insightful)
Hydropower, wind, solar, tidal, etc. There are lots of possibilities. I doubt there is any magic one size fits all solution, but there are plenty of existing non-nuclear technologies if we want to use them.
Re:Mr Burns Aside (Score:3, Interesting)
I'll dispute that.
Nuclear Power Safer Than Peanut Butter [mikelietz.org]
Even including chernobyl, nuclear power is safer per kilowatt/hour than any other source(except maybe hydro).
I mean, you have to be a total idiot in not following procedures to get yourself killed even in reprocessing operations.
When do materials for nuclear plants run out? (Score:2)
Re:When do materials for nuclear plants run out? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:When do materials for nuclear plants run out? (Score:4, Interesting)
Thing is, we aren't really prospecting for radioactives very hard. Oil's very profitable, so we're looking for it pretty hard.
Like any mineral resource, to include oil and such, there's several points for when you talk about how much is available. The two factors are the cost of extracting, and the difficulty of prospecting.
I'll use oil as an example. When you see figures for 'oil reserves' and remaining oil, it's generally the amount available at a certain price point. This is because it costs money and resources to extract. Certain fields almost spit it out, and then you have things like oil shale, where you have to really work at it. So it might cost $2 a barrel to extract from a Saudi Oil field, while it costs $60 a barrel to extract from Canada's oil shale fields. Thus, when they talk about the world's oil reserves, they generally don't include the shale fields.
Then you have prospecting. Nobody really looks very hard when Oil's at $10 a barrel, but when it's at $60 people tend to look very hard for additional sources.
As a third point, as the resource increases in value, technology for extracting the resource is developed. The very shale methods were developed around WWII due to the need for resources because fighting made many areas unsuitable. More recent innovations is being able to bend while drilling wells, thus being able to reach more fields economically.
As far as uranium and plutonium goes, we've discovered enough of it that we don't have to worry about it for the short term, due to a relativly intense search after WWII.
As price increases, more mines become economical, and prospecting increases. Uranium is relativly difficult to find compared to coal and oil.
Per This site [americanen...ndence.com] using known sources they figure that we could last for almost a thousand years using conventional reactors. If we go to more fuel efficient reactors such as breeders, this can be extended into the tens and hundreds of thousands of years.
It's just that you might have to accept $500/kg uranium rather than $40/kg as it was as of the survey. This would translat to a few more cents per kw/hour of electricity. Fuel for a nuclear plant is actually one of the smallest expenses. Labor is the largest. Going with breeder reactors would, of course reduce the fuel cost.
For that matter, we're looking into reprocessing the waste from our current reactors again. The older stuff has had enough time to cool down to make this alot easier.
Re:When do materials for nuclear plants run out? (Score:5, Interesting)
For use in the most common reactors you need to have a 5:95 mix of uranium-235:uranium-238 , but uranium ore is only 1% U-235, and the rest is U-238. So out of a batch of 100kg of ore you'll get ~1kg of U-235, so only ~10kg of reactor fuel.
The rest of the uranium-238 is depleted uranium waste; it's not pleasant stuff and we've got a whole bunch of it (the US alone has hundreds of thousands of tonnes) lying around. Going at the rate we're mining uranium ore we have, apparently, around 50 years of enrichable uranium ore left.
But uranium-238 isn't waste, at least not to a breeder reactor; when it accepts a neutron it becomes plutonium-239, which is a fissile fuel. In fact 1/3 of the power generated, even in conventional nuclear reacors, is from fission of plutonium-239 produced from uranium-238.
Basically put lots of uranium-238 into a reactor with a radioactive fuel which gives off a load of neutrons, and you're turning nuclear 'waste' back into nuclear fuel!
Fast breeder reactors use plutonium as the initial charge to get non-enriched uranium going (remember plutonium is produced in the reaction, so no worries about plutonium running out), and thermal breeder reactors use thorium, which is about as abundant as lead, to keep it going.
Using breeder reactors we've got all the nuclear fuel we'll possibly need; apparently in the range of 10,000 to five billion years worth. Also because actinide waste products are reprocessed and reused the spent fuel is less harmful, either being stable, or very unstable and having a short half-life (thus decaying and becoming stable).
This isn't science fiction either; Russia is using a breeder reactor at the moment, and India and China are planning to build their own (India is where most of the world's Thorium is so it's a natural choice for them). The reason it's not widely used is because it's slightly more expensive than using 5% uranium-235, and why use an expensive process when you can use a cheaper one.
So basically although electricity may get slightly more expensive we'll always have it available from breeder reactors. For me the real mystery is why environmentalists aren't crazy about this, taking nuclear waste and generating energy and non-radioactive waste? Sounds like an environmentalist's dream, but I guess they just can't see past the N-word.
Re:When do materials for nuclear plants run out? (Score:5, Insightful)
True for plain water reactors (most common outside of Canada and a few other places). The Canadian Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) reactor uses a heavy water moderator that will let it burn unenriched uranium. The tradeoff is that the lower temperature of a CANDU means slightly less thermal efficiency, but you don't have to worry about enriching the uranium (energy intensive) in the first place. You can harvest plutonium from the "spent" fuel rods.
The rest of the uranium-238 is depleted uranium waste; it's not pleasant stuff
It's not that bad -- sure it's toxic like any heavy metal but it's only mildly radioactive. The stuff is used as counterweights for control surfaces of large aircraft (lead is used on small aircraft). It's also used in armor-piercing ammunition, where it is nasty, because the impact tends to break the bullet into small pieces which burn easily and leaves uranium oxide all over the place.
But yes, using various breeder reactor cycles the energy supply is pretty unlimited. The biggest argument against same hasn't been so much the waste issue, but the nuclear proliferation issue. Given the state of the world, I'm not sure that that's really a valid argument anymore. (Sure, it's a concern, but that genie is already out of the bottle -- and sending tons of money to unstable regimes because of their hydrocarbon reserves isn't helping either.)
Re:When do materials for nuclear plants run out? (Score:3, Interesting)
The world supply of recoverable uranium is enough to last for around a thousand years, and that's with the current crop of horribly inefficient fission plants we're running now. If we reprocess the fuel using breeder reactors, multiply that by about a hundred-- and the waste storage problem is essentially eliminated as an added bonus.
This is why Iran wants a nuclear program (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, they probably want nukes too, but given we contained Mao and Stalin, who had a lot more of them and hated us as much for our "bourgeois capitalism", as the Iranians do for being the "Great Satan", it's not a big deal.
Re:This is why Iran wants a nuclear program (Score:2)
I'm all for new fast reaction nuc plants for now.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Ideally, I'd like to see home or neighborhood sized power generation. This would DRASTICALLY reduce the total amount needed due to loss in transmission lines. I read somewhere that this nears 50% of what's generated.
Since the "waste" of a fuel cell running on hydrogen is heat and water
Re:I'm all for new fast reaction nuc plants for no (Score:2)
Hydrogen is not a source of energy; it is way of storing energy or moving it around. (We don't have any hydrogen, except what we have made. To get more, you need to make more, which takes at least as much energy as you get from burning it.)
In addition to a lot of oil and gas, Alberta has a lot of clean coal.
I don't see the problem with putting nuclear waste in deep mine shafts in precambrian rock and then topping the shafts off with a
Re:I'm all for new fast reaction nuc plants for no (Score:2)
Re:I'm all for new fast reaction nuc plants for no (Score:2)
Re:I'm all for new fast reaction nuc plants for no (Score:2)
You might as well try burning smog.
Re:I'm all for new fast reaction nuc plants for no (Score:2)
Re:I'm all for new fast reaction nuc plants for no (Score:2)
Since you say fuel cells I can only assume you don't mean fusion. You must be really confused because hydrogen for fuel cells is an energy transport medium, not a source; there isn't an abundant supply of elemental hydrogen (H_2) on Earth (or are you talking about harvesting from gas gia
Re:I'm all for new fast reaction nuc plants for no (Score:2)
Re:I'm all for new fast reaction nuc plants for no (Score:2)
The energy to produce H2 could come from wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, hydro, or nuclear, but the source will have to be scalable, which currently leaves nuclear..
The amount of waste per watt from a nuclear plant is incredibally small, c
WRONG. We can produce hydrogen efficiently! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:WRONG. We can produce hydrogen efficiently! (Score:5, Informative)
Go ahead... put it in my back yard (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Go ahead... put it in my back yard (Score:3, Informative)
Heck, I'd also try to work there. Nuclear plants are great job oppertunities for local communities.
Re:Go ahead... put it in my back yard (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you know how large of a solor panal array you need to power a single (average) house? It ain't going to fit on your roof! Maybe if you pave over the entire surface of all your neighbors properties with solar cells. And don't excpect them to work at night. Think acres, not square feet.
Put a nice little wind turbine, or two, in your back yard. A nice little 300 foot high tower. Dead birds splattered far and wide. Liste
Pebble Bed (Score:5, Informative)
Pebble Bed reactors are the future: they are supposed to be safe, cheap and modular. They'll be mass-produced, and allow cities or factories to power themselves.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor [wikipedia.org]
Re:I remember the 1950s. (Score:2)
I mean, sure, we'll probably never see nuclear aircraft or trains. But a lot of the predictions in the 50s were extrapolations from the present day technology, and bad ones at that.
We went from smokestacks-as-a-symbol-of-progress to the current crop of environmental scare tactics. People are not able to rationally deal with the cold equations of how to move forwa
Re:I remember the 1950s. (Score:3, Interesting)
In france, 80% of electricity come from nuclear power, they also have one of the most extensive and electisied railway (railroads if your American) networks in the world. Therefor most of their many trains are effectivly nuclear trains. Sure, the reactor isn't actually onboard the train but what difference has it made? A bit more infastructure maybe, still far less overall cost per passanger mile than a modern highway.
More to the point, how
Re:I remember the 1950s. (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh, I think you drank the kool-aid. Nuclear reactors works fine, and overall are much safer than fossil fuels. You actually got what you were promised. But along the way the fossil fuel industry got serious about controlling public perception, so that everybody knows that nuclear power is deadly dangerous and coal and oil are sweet, kind and friendly.
They do this in all sorts of ways, but here are a few examples:
Nuclear power may not be perfect, but even the horror stories are better than what we're drifting into by letting the fossil fuel industry lead us down the garden path.
--MarkusQ
Re:I remember the 1950s. (Score:3, Interesting)
Was they guy who mass produced the infamous 'i survived three mile island' t-shirts an operative for the 'fossil fuel' industry? nope! just a capitialist looking to cash in on a fad!
and you know what, the fact that not a single person was injured in three mile island mattered to anyone. just the fact that a nuclear core could overheat and potentially go critical, that part of the early warning system faile
Re:I remember the 1950s. (Score:3, Insightful)
Too cheap to meter and as "clean" as a washing detergent advertisement.
The biggest problem I see are those that cook the books to make things look cheap and those who pretend that something inherently dangerous (like lots of things we use with proper precautions) is not. Everyone that has handled radioactive materials that are active enough to be immediately dangerous knows to treat them with respect instead of pretending there is no problem. The advertising agencies
We're pretty much in agreement (Score:3, Insightful)
The climate changes from global warming, and associated change in habitat ranges for other species (eg: malaria) is the best chance for the carbon mongers to wipe out the human race. Nuclear power has a better potential -- if people are stupid enough with it -- to wipe out our species outright.
It just struck me--we're contrasting the potential worst case of nuclear with the expected outcome if everything works as it should with fossil fuels. And, if we do that, it's pretty much a toss up.
--MarkusQ
Nuclear waste is scary but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nuclear waste is scary but... (Score:3, Informative)
It's not just the CO2 from fossil fuels which is dangerous -- coal (the primary source of electrical power) contains a significant quantity of radioactive isotopes [ornl.gov]. The burning of coal is actually responsible for more radioactive waste than nuclear power, and the radioactive waste from coal goes straight into the atmosphere.
Re:Nuclear waste is scary but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Where it is effectively diluted throughout the entire airspace, and that most likely means it presents less of a risk of radiation poisoning than the concentrated stores of spent nuclear fuel that are associated with traditional nuclear power plants.
There's plenty of other nasty things in coal smoke, like carcinogens, which I would imagine present a much more real danger than trace amounts of radioactive material.
Re:Nuclear waste is scary but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Is there any reason why nuclear waste cannot be recycled?
Just encase it in leaded glass, and insert that into a subduction zone, where it will safely be heating the planet's magma along with lots of naturally occurring radioactive material. In a few hundred thousand years it will reappear, diffused to the weaker levels that we see in volcanic lava, or as part of a plate edge upwelling from the planetary interior.
In any event, it will be well away from contact with the biosphere for a length of
Here's hoping we get one soon! (Score:5, Insightful)
Nah, people will just blame that I'm fat on being lazy, it's not like there could be other contributing factors.
With ITER failing . . . (Score:2)
First they came for the anaerobic bacteria, and I said nothing because I was not an anaerobic bacteria . . .
--Ryv
What we need to do first... (Score:2, Insightful)
That being said, we need a lot of nuclear power. We have the technology to control it, we have the smart people to maintain it.
Re:What we need to do first... (Score:2)
The answer is not necessarily to have a single standardized reactor design. For one, we don't know which of the potential interesting desig
Good, we need nuclear power (Score:3, Interesting)
We only need a couple hundred year guarantee (Score:3, Insightful)
Nice idea, but lead time? (Score:2)
I'm down with the pebble bed designs and all that, but last I checked nuclear reactors take a decade to plan and build, and ... we don't have a decade.
Re:Nice idea, but lead time? (Score:2)
We don't?
What About Nuclear Recycling (Score:5, Informative)
There's a really good article (only a preview available) at Scientific American [sciam.com] which explains the pyrometalurgical process and the fast reactors that allow this.
On the other hand, the reactors mentioned in the article won't hurt anything if the reactors I'm talking about get built later. They can supposedly burn up the nuclear waste from existing reactors.
A rational option (Score:2)
a) Depoliticize the running of them - the first thing that suffers when politics overtakes reality is safety, as NASA is a perfect illustration of. Having a good, long-term safety policy built into an organization isn't something that can be done overnight, and building an agency to replace the DOE is impossible in the current polarized political environment.
b) Figure out how to prevent proliferation of high-grade fissionable materals; t
Subsidies (Score:2)
US Congress 2005 energy bill, tax credits worth $3.1 billion, along with liability protection and compensation for legislative delay
In other words, without subsidies and special protections (the likes of which I wish I had) nuclear power is not economically feasible.
I find it disgusting as well that one of the reasons nuclear has to be subsidized is due to huge subsidies to oil and coal industries.
Basically it just a way for special interests to stuff their snouts deeper into the public trough. And th
Shearon Harris site selected by Progress Energy (Score:2)
Morningstar news report [morningstar.com]
This will be the second reactor on this site. The existing one was the last commercial nuclear reactor certified for operation in the US after the 3 Mile Island accident.
Because the new rector is more powerful than the one built in the 1980's, they may have to increase the depth of Harris Lake to provide additional cooling water capacity. Which would suck, as
Interesting bit of trivia about nuclear dangers (Score:3, Insightful)
Another advantage of nukes (Score:5, Informative)
When I was working in 3D animation, one of my clients was Commonwealth Edison, the Chicago electric company. ComEd's plants were mostly nukes. I loved working for them, because most of the work I did was to explain concepts. Anyway...
They have a project called "Northwind". It consists of two 5 story tall buildings in downtown Chicago (eventually four) that, during the summer months, make ice all night long. During the day, the ice melts and the 33 degree water travels through pipes to subscribers to air-condition buildings. This allows client buildings to avoid wasting floors on their own chillers and avoid using electricity during the day for air-conditioning. ComEd can even out the demand for power and avoid building additional plants for a while.
Re:New Nuclear Reactors (Score:2)
Re:New Nuclear Reactors (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not saying that decentralized power won't be
Re:Nuclear Waste? (Score:2)
No, not really. But come on. Dump it in Yucca Mountain and damn the anti-nuclear environmentalists.
Re:Nuclear Waste? (Score:2)
Max
Re:Nuclear Waste? (Score:4, Informative)
When you get all the energy you can out of the fuel, the remainder doesn't stay radioactive for that long. Most of them are short to mid half-life isotopes, so they decay quickly.
Re:Nuclear Waste? (Score:4, Insightful)
As compared to where we are putting the waste from burning fossil fuels -- which is straight into the air?
Re:Nuclear Waste? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Move towards wind or hydro. (Score:5, Insightful)
We have a finite supply of nuclear fuel, sure. On the other hand, if we reprocess nuclear waste and take advantage of existing Thorium reserves, our finite supply will last over a hundred thousand years.
Considering that ice ages tend to disrupt hydro power generation and occur rather more frequently than once every hundred thousand years, I'd say that nuclear power is less finite than hydro power.
Re:WTF? that's utter tripe (Score:2)
Re:WTF? that's utter tripe (Score:2)
Honestly 100,000 is a vary conservative estimate and ignores the ocean's. Every year significantly more uranium ends up in the worlds ocean's than is used by our power plants and operating a power plant using uranium from the ocean only raises cost's by about 5% so it's not unreasonable to think of uranium as a renewable power source that is viable for ~1,000,000,000 years. Uranium is vary common; hell extracting Uranium from coal provides more power than burnin
Re:Move towards wind or hydro. (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, nuclear plants to not produce pollution comparable to coal power. Nuke plants take in relatively small amounts of fuel and produce a relatively small amount of contained waste. Coal plants take in a huge amount of coal and produce a huge amount of waste, some of which is contained and some of which is vented into the atmosphere.
Re:Move towards wind or hydro. (Score:2)
In many estimates, the amount of material we have to sustain a breeder reactor program here on Earth is comparable to the length of time that the Sun will continue to output energy. No energy is truly "renewable", some just have such big supplies of fuel that they might as weel be considered inexhaustable (eg solar, and it's derivates like wind, hydro, etc and some forms of breeder reactors).
If there's anything we need in the energy industry ri
Re:Move towards wind or hydro. (Score:2, Interesting)
Also, the other power sources you mention have a long way to go before they have a chance of being a viable re
Re:Move towards wind or hydro. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Move towards wind or hydro. (Score:3, Funny)
> which have put significant resources towards wind, hydro,
> solar, tidal, and other renewable energy sources
Hmm, I'm Canadian and I can't think of any large-scale wind or tidal energy projects here. The idea of large-scale solar power at this latitude is pretty funny, though.
There's a lot of hydro energy here, only because we've got lots of trackless wilderness to flood.
Re:Move towards wind or hydro. (Score:5, Insightful)
100 or 200 years isn't a long time. (Score:3, Insightful)
We know there are renewable resources out there, and in many places they are abundant. Talk about mining material from extraterrest
Re:100 or 200 years isn't a long time. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:100 or 200 years isn't a long time. (Score:3, Insightful)
Nuclear had not been invented
Transistor had not been invented
No-one had been to space
Materials science could not build a jet engine
Laser did not exist
Radar had not been imagined
Are you seriously saying we go to ultra-expensive solar/wind today because of a resource that you think may run out in 200 years?
Re:Wind economical now? (Score:3, Informative)
Now, as to all the wind cancellation in Australia, you may wish to google. It appears that projects are moving forward just fine. [pacifichydro.com.au] As to those that were killed, give it time. Most, if not all, of the projects will be back. As more
Re:Move towards wind or hydro. (Score:5, Insightful)
At, and here's an important bit, present fuel costs.
As fuel costs increase, reserves go up, because stuff that wasn't worth exploiting before now is. Fuel costs don't even have to increase too much before uranium extraction from seawater becomes economical, to about $400/lb. The amount of uranium in the oceans at this moment is enough to power the entire world's current energy demand for 7 million years, about 5E9 tons of the stuff.
There's enough uranium around that by the time we run out of it, we'll be able to construct large-scale solar power satellites and ginormous groundside microwave rectennas. And we don't have to confine ourselves to uranium; there's even more thorium around than uranium, and while that won't sustain a chain reaction, it'll fission just fine in an energy amplifier, and you can breed more fissile fuel in the process.
It's doubtful that we'll ever get fusion working, but there's so much fission fuel around capable of driving one plant design or another that if we haven't figured out solar collection satellites by the time we start feeling the pinch of running out of it, we'll deserve to go extinct.
Details [stanford.edu].
"He comments that lasting 5 billion years, i.e. longer than the sun will support life on earth, should cause uranium to be considered a renewable resource."
Uranium recovery from seawater [jaeri.go.jp].
Actually I WILL do exactly that... (Score:2)
~D
Re:I'm worried about new plants in the US... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I'm worried about new plants in the US... (Score:2)
Or from the UAE...
Re:I'm worried about new plants in the US... (Score:5, Funny)
Homer: Hey, you guys aren't from around here, are you?
Man 1: Ach, nein. We are from Chermany. He is from ze East. I am from ze Vest.
Man 2: I hat a big company, and he hat a big company, and now we have a very big company.
Man 1: We are interested in buying the power plant. Do you think the owner will ever sell it?
Homer: Well, I happen to know that he won't sell it for less than $100 million!
Man 2: 100 million?
Man 1: [opens a briefcase of cash, counts] Eins, zwei, drei, vier, fuenf...
Oh, don't vorry, we still enough left to buy the Cleveland Browns.
Re:Nuclear Power: The Way to Go! (Score:5, Informative)
Um... NO [chernobyl.co.uk] . Not only no, but hell fucking no, you're wrong. You're probably thinking about Three Mile Island [nrc.gov]. How this shit got modded up, I'll never know. That half-assed link of yours also glossed over Chernobyl, which was actually a quite major event. I'm not saying nuke plants aren't much, much better than Chernobyl was, but we need to be continually cognizant of the dangers inherent in things like nuclear power. That being said, the greater the risk, often the greater the reward. We just need to make sure the risk is managed.
Re:Thorium (Score:4, Interesting)
The nuclear industry uses too much science fiction - put a fraction of the advertising budget into that project in India and you may see more science instead.